THE LINE AND THE REAL: TOWARD A NON-LINEAR ONTOLOGY OF TIME

Author

Matthew Z. Donnelly, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

8-1-2019

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Auxier, Randall

Abstract

In this dissertation I argue that, contrary to apparent experience and contrary to many inherited traditions, time is not ontologically linear. As a complement to this argument, I identify a genealogy of implicit non-linear aspects of the theories of significant Western philosophers of time. This genealogy constitutes an iterative argument that culminates in the work of Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger. Within their philosophies, I identify time as ontologically intensive, as opposed to the inherited tradition of spatializing—and therefore rendering extensive—time. The key component of this argument is ontological intensity—that the being of time itself resists articulation in language or conceptual schemes characterized by systems of mutual, external relations. Instead, I argue that time is best understood by reference to pre-articulate logos. Such pre-articulate logos is both intensive and ontologically (synoptically) plural. The dissertation comes to rest in the position that time is the becoming of pre-spatial, intensive ontology. Accordingly, the dissertation’s genealogy concludes in pluralistic rest, then, with the assertion that temporal ontology—real time—can be collected under the conceptual aegis of non-linearity.